


Trespasser

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Gen, transgressions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-02 21:50:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/373712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sherlock has always been a trespasser. When he was a child, he learnt his crossings from an invisible friend named Lamia Osmosis, who taught him that most boundaries are permeable.”</p>
<p>“He’s a shiny-eyed jackdaw on a shiny cache of clues-- thievish, covetous, imperious, lovely.”</p>
<p>“John, whose affections are free radicals, the stiff-tailed scenthounds of the molecular.”</p>
<p>Five times Sherlock was crossing the line(s), and one time when he wasn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trespasser

**Author's Note:**

> For Chapbook, for making me think about trespassing (among other things).
> 
> And thank you to [whitefang3927](http://archiveofourown.org/users/whitefang3927/pseuds/whitefang3927) for inciting me to the 5+ 1.

 

_“Now I've always been the kind of person that doesn't like to trespass but sometimes you just find yourself over the line.  
Oh if there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now.  
You know, I feel pretty good, but that ain't sayin' much. I could feel a whole lot better,  
If you were just here by my side to show me how.”—Bob Dylan, “Brownsville Girl”_

**Osmosis**

Sherlock has always been a trespasser. When he was a child, he learnt his crossings from an invisible friend called Lamia Osmosis, who taught him that most boundaries are permeable. (Fences, cell membranes, time, gender, the natural: England is riven with fey lines; cavort at your own peril, unless you’re Sherlock Holmes.)

He doesn’t like _The Wind in the Willows_ (Mole missing his laid lines; so dull).  He likes pictures of heterocyclic compounds and maps of international waters. He likes the _OED_ , ( _offence, breach, iniquity_ ), and the element lithium, because it flashes fire when wet, and that (obviously) is _transgressive._

**Ephemera**

No-one likes him. They all hate him. No-one has ever loved him.  They hold each others’ faces and kiss. Ephemera. He doesn’t care. And when he blows through their rigorous, amorous, idiotic spaces (limned with hormones and obliterated astrocytes) he thinks about death. (And how often that one has stolen from his boss, and how often this one has left her --green, expensive--underthings in her boyfriend’s cousin’s mouldering flat.)

Stimulants are like bribes; he crosses with them, crosses.

**Jackdaw**

The first time Sherlock sees a body--at an official crime scene, anyway--he doesn't go white or put his hand to his mouth or even avert his eyes. Instead, he struts right up and says hello, quite literally.

“Er, Sherlock,” says Lestrade, “That's not really appropriate. “

But Sherlock has always been a trespasser.  He’s a shiny-eyed jackdaw on a shiny cache of clues-- thievish, covetous, imperious, lovely.

He puts the case to bed in less than ten minutes.

He nicks Lestrade’s regard right out of its holster. He nicks Anderson’s ID. He spins Donovan round-- fluttering, mad, Continental blackbird-man-- and kisses her on both cheeks. She looks at him with unadulterated hate, then puts a hand to her cheek and ducks into the nearest car.

Later, at the pub, his team won't laugh at Lestrade’s black-humoured _bons mots,_ and he'll have to buy or they won't keep drinking with him at all.

The next time, Sherlock lifts the tape as though it were meant for him.

  **Crossroads**

“Use mine,” John says, holding out his phone, and Sherlock will, because landlines are tedious, because that’s what he does, because _who is this_ , and because something shifts, a little, right at the midline.

**War Zone**

221B is like, well, not like a war zone, because John’s been in those, and the metaphor offends him. He does come home from the clinic, though, shoot one look at the crisis in the kitchen, bolt to the toilet, and commence dry-heaving.

Sherlock opens the door; of course he does.   
  
“Are you all right?”  
  
“Do I look all right?”  
  
“I know it wasn't the chiffonade of nematodes,” Sherlock says. “You’ve seen far worse.”

John chokes over the toilet. (It’s not the nematodes; more likely a norovirus, but he’s not saying.)

Sherlock rests two fingertips between his scapulae.

“John, if I were to tell you what I'm thinking right now --it's about grave-robbing--you'd say, ‘that is the most fucked thing I have ever heard.’ But it would be only _one_ of the most fucked things you've ever heard. And you are quite likely to hear more.”

**Free Radical  
**

How in the bloody hell did he find himself here, armed only with... _Fuck all_ , he thinks, _that’s what John Watson thinks I know about love._

It’s not a mystery to him. 

( _John, whose affections are free radicals, the stiff-tailed scenthounds of the molecular. They are--and it’s a miracle—unkennelled; they want the hunt. They want to run_.)

It’s not a mystery to me, he says to the skull; it does a service to his only-oneness, that he’s the only one who ever chose me on a molecular level, the only one who ever chose me in that way, and whom I also chose.


End file.
